Painting boxes Efficiently

OK, I know we all say that in the winter is a great time to paint boxes and read bee books. Somehow I always manage to get all the way to spring without accomplishing this.

So it's time to move my overwintered nucs into boxes and to make splits and to move some bees around. There's a good chance that a camera person will be in my apiary this year, so I wanted my boxes to look slightly more like Martha Stewart. (As a well-known blog states, I am NOTMARTHA)

The GBA newsletter had an article this month about painting boxes in a stack using a paint roller. The author had found the method on YouTube. I went and looked at several videos on YouTube an set about trying this out for quick, efficient box painting for the procrastinating beekeeper.

You start by stacking the boxes one on top of the other, upside down. An adorable boy on a YouTube video explains that putting them upside down means that when you paint the handholds, the paint collects on the ledge instead of dripping down. I painted the boxes on top of dirt, mildew, whatever.

First I painted the hand holds since I wanted them to be a different color: green. Then I painted the boxes blue with a roller. The whole process was quick as a wink - took less than 30 minutes. I only know because I was baking bread and started when the bread went into the oven and I was done by the moment the timer went off to tell me the bread was done!

So yesterday I ended up with delicious homemade bread and lovely boxes all in the same day. By afternoon, it was warm enough and the paint was dry so I moved one of the overwintered nucs into its new home.

Heat from Inside Can/not Predict Live Bees in Winter

At GBA this past weekend, Jim Tew suggested that if you wanted to have a good time in the winter, go buy yourself a cheap stethoscope and have yourself a party listening to the sides of your beehives. It probably isn't much of a party if you don't hear anything, but if you do, that could be fun.

We had snow on January 23. Not much of a snow, but it did actually fall white out of the sky and accumulated barely on our yards before it melted by midday or early afternoon. In the morning I looked out of my window and noticed that snow was melting on top of my hives.

OK, I thought, if a hive has melted snow on the top, the bees are generating enough heat to melt it...that would be an indication that the hive is alive. If the snow is totally unmelted, the hive must be dead. Sounds reasonable, right?

So here's the tour:

Nuc number one: made from the tall hive to the left in late July:

Nice hot little melted circle and I have the warm confident feeling that this hive is alive.

Nuc Number two: also made from the tall hive to the left in late July:

This nuc is in a deep with one medium super above it. The snow is unmoved by bee heat, so I assume this nuc is dead. After all, it seemed light and had not taken the honey I had fed them.

Hive Three: Survivor swarm from my neighborhood. This is its second winter. These bees refused to use the entrance once I put a Billy Davis robber screen on and found their way out through a crack in a board on the side.

Again the snow and ice have melted - in a funny slanted pattern, but melted, nonetheless. So I assumed these bees were alive.

Next hive: A Jarrett Apiaries package that I did not harvest from because I wanted them to have enough food to go through winter

Snow covered with no signs of melting. These bees must be dead.

This is a hive that was in a nuc through last winter that I kept in a nuc most of bee season. In July I moved it into a normal hive to overwinter. See the round pattern of melted ice and snow? These bees are going to make it through their second winter.

And finally my "mother" hive who has birthed most of these babies. She began as a split from a survivor hive that I got from Bill Owens. This hive is a swarm from the Bill Owens hive in Tom Phillips' yard. And look at the powerful circle of heat it has generated. This is this hive's third winter.

So, as Paul Harvey used to say, here is the "Rest of the Story." That was the title of his radio show.

So all the hives that I thought were alive are indeed alive. Following Walt Wright's checkerboarding plan, I have been into the top of all of the hives in the last two weeks and attempted checkerboarding. I say attempted because I don't have lots of drawn comb and because some of the honey domes in my hives included honey joined to honey in the next frame so lifting one of those frames would cause a mess of dripping honey in the hive and I didn't want that. So in the eight frames, I moved at least three in each hive to an upper box and moved in drawn comb.

However, all the hives I thought were dead were not. The nuc in the deep is so concentrated in the deep and have not used the box above it at all. I had an inner cover on it with a surround nuc box and an interior Boardman feeder of honey in the top box with the top cover on that. I assume that the heat generated by the hive was dissipated by the time it made its way through the empty second box and the inner cover.

The hive totally covered with snow was indeed dead. I opened it and it was full of honey that had not been slimed by the SHB. This means they went into winter with honey, but had died for another reason. The bottom of the hive was full of dead bees. I did not see deformed wing, but I'm sure the hive died by something vectored by the varroa mite. I did not use the honey left in the hive to feed any other hives because I did not want to transmit disease and all of the other hives had plenty of honey.

The one hive short on supplies (or at least I thought so because they had no honey in the second box) was the deep nuc covered with snow. I filled a feeder jar with honey and put it in the surround nuc box and by the next day the bees had moved all of the honey into the nuc box below.

So while looking at melted snow does tell part of the story, it doesn't necessarily tell the whole story.

A Sad Time for Beekeepers: Walt Wright has Died

Walt Wright died on February 6 in Tennessee. A former NASA engineer and a GE employee in the security side of things, he brought his analytical mind to beekeeping and taught all of us about checkerboarding.

Walt took up beekeeping in his retirement in his fifties. He observed the bees with his scientific perspective and recognized that the hive is driven to survive and to reproduce by swarming. He determined that the beekeeper could attempt to fool the bees into thinking that they had more room to fill with honey (and thus shouldn't leave) by leaving empty drawn comb in the crown of honey above the winter cluster.

He called this process checkerboarding because every other frame would be filled with honey - let's say frames in positions 1, 3, 5, and 7 and that 2, 4, 6, and 8 would be empty drawn comb. He moved the capped honey formerly in 2, 4, 6, and 8 into a new box above and put empty drawn comb in 1, 3, 5, and 7. This created a checkerboard effect (and thus the name).

His writings and musings about the bees have been read widely by many. Most of his writing can be found on Beesource.  On the column to the left of his bio, you can find whole articles by him - don't be confused by the list of titles below his bio - the full item can be found in the left column.

I wish I had met him or heard him speak. He made so many great contributions to the beekeeping community. It's amazing that he had impact on how so many of use think about bees.

Georgia Beekeepers Association State conference on February 13

The GBA Spring Conference is February 13 in Milledgeville, GA at Central Georgia Technical College. Registration for GBA members is $40 for early registration. Tomorrow the registration fee goes up to $65 a person. Register today if you want to go!

Julia and I have been planning the meeting. We did not invite the speakers this year. The president gave that task to a committee of three: Jennifer Berry, Keith Fielder, and Andy Bailey. The speakers who are coming are Jim Tew, who writes a column for Bee Culture; Roger Simonds, who analyzes wax at the NC bee lab; Kerry Owen, a South Carolina commercial beekeeper; and David Westervelt, who is the state bee inspector for the state of Florida.

Saturday is an all-day meeting with the keynote speakers scattered throughout the day. There are breakouts also during the day - a mead making session taught by Tom Hill of Macon County, NC; wax products by Julia Mahood; how to run a junior beekeeping program by Holly Bayendor; and others.

The college is a great setting for such a meeting with state of the art technical support.

Hope to see you there.

It's the Coldest Night of the Year and I'm Thinking of Bee Season

A while back I wrote an essay for a workshop on being changed through experience. It's cold and I hope my bees are clustering and happily awaiting spring. Meanwhile I thought I'd put this essay on my blog:
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Bee Changed

I open the hive to the steady hum of bees at work. They hardly notice my presence because I move slowly. Slowly, that’s the key, and it’s so hard for me. I have always walked fast; managed fifteen things at once; had several thought threads running through my head at the same time.

But not when I’m with the bees.

My relationship with the bees is careful, mindful. I treat them with respect and awe and they appear to ignore me. But if I violate the boundaries or accidentally kill one of their sisters, ZING, they tattoo me with stings. I don’t want to get stung and they don’t want to die (it’s suicide if they choose to sting me). We have a silent pact.

When it’s good, I feel a zen-like peace. A hum is in the air, the fan of bee wings is all around me, and I am moving slowly as if in a dance. While I have opened up the hive and peered into their world, I am keeping the hive covered with a pillow case to maintain a semblance of their usual darkness, and I am lifting frames of honey and bees like a slow-motion movie.

When I walk around my neighborhood, I watch the plants and flowers. Are the bees interested in these? I wonder. Every year my list expands. First there’s mahonia which the bees find in early, early spring (January and early February) along with the red maple. Then other flowers make their entrances: holly, tulip poplar, blackberry. I read up on all of them, photograph them, and notice where they are for the next year. I am trying to approach the nature around me with the eye of the bee.

Sometimes when rain threatens, I watch the Weather Channel, because I am worried about the bees. The foragers can’t fly that day and can’t gather food. If there is a shortfall of rain or if we have back to back rainy days, I feel scared for them either way.

On a rainy day, I build equipment for my beehives. When I needed a shim, a two-inch tall “box” to put on the beehive to surround a two-inch tall plastic sandwich container for catching small hive beetles, I bought wood at a big box store. The sandwich box was taller than the shim I had so carefully built from boards called one by twos.  Apparently the construction industry cuts something called a 1X2 but, in reality, the board is shorted in each way by ¼ inch. I could feel my eyes filling with tears.

To complete the sandwich box small hive beetle trap, I needed a soldering iron to melt holes just the right size for the beetle to crawl into, so I went looking for one. I happened to be at a craft store and there on the shelf was a pink soldering iron with a pale green-lettered sign:  Women’s Soldering Iron. I bought it because I needed it but felt hot anger on the inside.

When I don’t know what I am doing with the bees, I reach out to beekeeping people all over the world. I post photos and worries on my beekeeping blog and people from as far away as Denmark and Greece answer me. I have friends in all the states who know me from my blog. When I finally met Michael Bush, a dear hippy beekeeper from Nebraska and one of my heroes, I felt like my wishes had been granted.

When my day starts in the early morning as the sun is coming up, I go straight to the backyard to watch and listen to the bees. I stand about four feet in front of six beehives. Golden flickers stream past me as the foraging bees’ wings catch the rising sunshine. I am transfixed and transformed. I am bee-ing changed by my life with the bees.

Happy Bee Year 2016 - It's Finally Cold

In Atlanta, it is finally cold and the bees are clustering (and hopefully alive). They have had countless days to fly. As is typical of January in the south, there are some blooming plants so the bees can find pollen and some nectar from outliers like Fatsia Japonica:

As I walked the dog, I saw camellia in bloom and the bees are often on it. Unlike the day I took the photos above, the day I shot the camellia was too cold for bees, but here is the camellia anyway:

While my own rosemary is not in bloom, I saw several rosemary varieties that were:

And although I didn't get its picture, mahonia is in bloom as well. I passed one in bloom while walking Hannah and thought, oh, I'll get the next one and there was no next one! Here's a photo of it from the Internet. When the bloom is finished, dark blue berries appear. The bees love the flowers and the birds love the berries - isn't nature grand!

Wax and Winter

Mostly in the winter I fool around with wax. I should be cleaning frames (or better yet, my basement), but instead, I find myself rustling up a batch of soap or making lip balm. Wax is my winter friend.

I just bought ripe avocados to make a soap recipe that the Soap Queen mentioned and must make it tonight or tomorrow while the avocado is not over-ripe.

Just to pique my curiosity, on the GBA Facebook page today, there is a link to an article about 17 uses of beeswax. I visited the page, of course, and just had to comment on her article. It is really good and includes wonderful, helpful links to pages and pages of adventures with beeswax.

Interestingly, she did not include soap making. Jeff and I are dedicated to putting beeswax into every soap we make. I changed the avocado soap recipe to include some beeswax. That's what lye calculators are for, you know! Here are two: Brambleberry's calculator and Majestic Mountain Sage's calculator. As any of you who make soap know, even recipes you find on the Internet should be run through a lye calculator before you make them and certainly if you change the recipe up at all, you should put it through one as well.

Speaking of recipes on the Internet, I plan to create a section on this blog for soap recipes, as someone asked for in a blogpost comment.

Winter, Summer, It's All the Same in Atlanta

OK, it's not unusual for me not to break out my winter coat until January and our worst winter months are February and early March. As a matter of fact, the two hardest snowstorms we have had the entire thirty-seven years I've lived in Atlanta were in March 1993 and in February 2014. In the March snowstorm the temperatures were in the teens and we had tons of snow (relatively speaking) and no power for over a week. In February 2014, I got home just fine in each of the two snowstorms two weeks apart, but many people were stranded on the Interstates since in Georgia we get layers of ice under the snow on the streets and driving is impossible.

But in all of those years, in November and December, while my winter coat remained in the closet, I would on many mornings put on my fleece jacket or vest. We did have one cold week here in 2015 during early December, but it only warranted a jacket in the early morning. By afternoon the temperature had risen up to the high 60s.

This Christmas week takes the cake. Yesterday the thermometer read 79.5 F - couldn't quite get to 80. I mean, really, it's DECEMBER.

So the bees are confused and this is bad news. Every day they are flying, using up energy and needing to consume their saved stores. There is an illusion among the hives that spring may already be springing - is the queen laying at her pre-spring rate? Or is she slowly increasing as of December 21 which is her usual procedure?

Right after the actual cold winter week, I saw evidence on one hive that they may have nosema.

But that was several weeks ago and the bees in that nuc hive continue to fly as eagerly as the others.

I worry because I didn't feed my bees this year - I rarely do. Instead I harvested relatively little, leaving lots on each hive for the bees. The nuc in the photo and a sister nuc are from splits I made in late July after the nectar flow had long ceased. I gave each of those hives two jars of honey, harvested from another hive.

So in giving them that honey did I transfer nosema from the other hive to them?

I don't know, but we can only hope for the best.  I won't feed them anymore and cross my fingers that they make it through the winter. The two nuc overwintering hives are splits from my strongest survivor hive so hopefully they will have traits to endure their way through nosema or whatever else the varroa mite dishes out over the "winter," such as it is!